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Just one month after becoming Conservative leader David Cameron said that “the prospect of bringing back grammar schools has always been wrong”.

So Westminster insiders noted with interest that Mr Cameron chose to announce his resignation as an MP on the day Theresa May, his successor as Prime Minister, released a paper outlining her proposals to bring back selective schools.

On Monday, Mr Cameron and former members of his staff insisted that his decision to quit as an MP had nothing to do with Mrs May’s decision to reverse his education reforms.

It seemed fitting however, that Mr Cameron announced his decision just minutes before Justine Greening, the new Education Secretary, was due in the House of Commons to set out the plans for a new generation of grammar schools.

In recent weeks, Mr Cameron has watched as Mrs May has undone much of what he achieved while in charge of the Government.

Within days of taking office, Theresa May had already frozen out David Cameron’s inner circle.

His closest ministerial allies – most notably George Osborne – had been sacked in a brutal Cabinet reshuffle.

Many of his most trusted Downing Street aides were also fired and told that their services were no longer required in Mrs May’s new Government.

Although friends maintain that Mr Cameron has been sanguine about Mrs May’s decision to distance herself from his administration, they concede that he has been left “disappointed” by what many see as her evisceration of his legacy.

She used her first address on the steps of Downing Street to say that her she would not govern “just for the privileged few” – comments that were seen as a thinly-veiled attack on her predecessor.

At her first Cabinet meeting after taking office, she told her ministers that “politics is not a game”.

Again, this was seen as a tacit criticism of the way Mr Cameron and Mr Osborne ran their Government, which was regularly described as a “chumocracy” by their opponents.

The new Downing Street administration was also critical of Mr Cameron’s resignation honours list, which was used to give knighthoods and peerages to aides and colleagues who had joined his failed campaign to keep Britain in the European Union.

After the list was released Mrs May’s Number 10 said that in future honours lists will “restore trust and confidence in our most important institutions”.

However, it is Mrs May’s grammar schools policy that will have hurt Mr Cameron the most.

In that 2006 interview, Mr Cameron said: “The prospect of bringing back grammar schools has always been wrong and I’ve never supported it. And I don’t think any Conservative government would have done it.”

Sources close to Mr Cameron admitted that it is almost inconceivable that he could have walked through the same voting lobby as Mrs May.

They said this would “have created a huge story that would have been a massive distraction”.

“David knows how difficult being prime minister is,” the source said. “Anything he did or said that could have been interpreted as not being fully supportive of what the new Government is doing would have become a huge issue. He did not want the new PM to have to deal with that.”

Asked whether he had quit because of Mrs May’s grammar schools policy, Mr Cameron said: “This decision has got nothing to do with any one individual issue and that way the timing I promise is coincidental but it goes to a bigger picture really which is, whatever the issue as a former PM, being a backbench MP, it’s difficult not to be a distraction and diversion and therefore build a reputation for yourself in politics that I don’t really want to have.

“I wish her well, I wish the government well. In a way, there’s a link to the decision to resign as PM. The country made a decision, a decision I advised against, but nonetheless the decision has been made and I want the government to successfully pursue that decision and get it right. As a result, not being a backbencher but leaving parliament is the right thing to do.”

When asked, “do you or do you not support the expansion of grammar schools as articulated by Theresa May last week?”, Mr Cameron would only say: “I think there’s very many good things in the policy.

“When I was PM we agreed to the expansion of grammar schools in areas where they already were. We set up sixth forms that were selective in our big cities as free schools. Lots of merit in the policy. Frankly I don’t want to get into the wheres and whys of this individual policy.”